


Ripples In The Loop

by bzarcher



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Fixing the Timeline, Gen, Podfic Welcome, Slipstream Accident, Temporal Causality, Temporal Paradox, Time Travel, except not exactly, temporal loops, time can be rewritten
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-22
Updated: 2016-11-22
Packaged: 2018-09-01 11:29:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8622880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bzarcher/pseuds/bzarcher
Summary: Lena Oxton was born in 2050, and went into the Slipstream in the year 2068.Tracer fought in the Omnic Crisis alongside Jack Morrison, Ana Amari, and Gabriel Reyes from 2042-2050. Lena Oxton was retrieved from the Slipstream in 2069, and Tracer became an official agent of Overwatch in 2070. All of these things are true.





	

Lena Oxton was born October 11, 2050.

Well, that’s the date on the birth certificate, anyway. When you’re left, perhaps a month old, at the emergency room of a hospital during the Omnic Blitz, knowing exactly when you were born isn’t really possible.

She wanted to fly from the moment she saw a Red Arrows performance for the King’s birthday broadcast on the BBC. Put in her courses. Worked like hell. Lied her way into flight school and managed to have enough talent that the RAF recruiters let it slide.

She’s tapped for Empire Flight Test on November 5, 2066.

It's February 20, 2068, and she’s being offered a chance to fly a plane that doesn’t exist yet. So secret and complex that it _shouldn’t_ exist, but some boffin in Overwatch thinks he’s found a way to make it work.

Everyone knew the Wright Brothers were the first to fly.

Everyone knew Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier.

Everyone knew Yuri Gagarin was the first man to go into space.

Everyone knew Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon.

Everyone knew Evelyn Carter was the first woman to walk on Mars.

If she said yes, everyone would know that Lena Oxton was the first woman to jump through Time itself.

How could she say no?

It is September 29, 2068 when Lena Oxton tries to take the _Slipstream_ for the first test teleportation flight – a basic hop from one side of the flight test range to the other.

There is a burst of blue light, and she is gone.

Lena finds herself _here / there / nowhere_. The plane is gone. Her flight suit is gone. She is engulfed, naked, in a river of time.

Impossible, yet still aware of her existence.

The first time she tries to go home, she simply thinks of _England_ , and she is there. Wearing a uniform that scratches and itches her skin from all the starch, a cap over her head as she works to clean silver and set m’lady’s table for supper.

The calendar on the wall reads April 18, 1923.

_That isn’t right._

The second time she tries to go home, she thinks of _Overwatch_ , and she finds herself in a room surrounded by her heroes. Friends. Superior officers. But they are all so _young_.

Cap still wears her long dark hair down in inky falls of raven black, not a hint of the iron grey that would one day be wrapped in her braid.

The scar over Reinhardt’s eye is a vivid red, not the faded pink she remembered, and his platinum blond mane is a majestically untamed thing when he shakes it out after doffing his armor.

The commander – Jack – is the XO right now, while Gabriel Reyes leads, his orders occasionally harsh, but with thought and reason behind each of the tough calls. He’ll go barefoot into Hell for his people, and against the seemingly endless waves of Oms they face, that’s all they could ask for.

They call her ‘Tracer’, and she has a strange device strapped to her body. It’s a part of her, and she knows how to use it as instinctively as her lungs breathe and her heart beats, even though she knows it didn’t exist before. It lets her fight in ways she’d never imagined, moving faster than an eyeblink through time and space.

She’s a hero.

They’re awarded the United Nations Medal for their role in shutting down the Munich omnium and relieving the siege at Eichenwalde on May 19, 2046. Somehow she has a dress uniform with medals she knows she earned, service ribbons she knows are correct, and a rank she knows she was awarded. But it doesn’t make sense in some tiny corner of her mind, because she never flew in combat. The Crisis was over before she was in kindergarten. Yet everyone knows her. She knows each of them. She remembers things she cannot possibly have seen, from battles fought long before her birth.

She tries to look up her birth certificate in the Overwatch records database. It says she was born in March of 2021.

_How did this happen?_

The last thing she remembers is helping with relief efforts after the worst attack on London since the New Blitz began.

She finds a baby strapped into a car seat, miraculously unharmed after being thrown out of a wrecked saloon car. She’s young – not even two months old, wrapped in an orange blanket. The little girl’s chestnut hair and her dancing eyes, the color of dark honey, are unmistakable.

Tracer takes the baby who will be named Lena Oxton to St. Leonard’s and leaves her in the Emergency Room. No one sees her enter. No one sees her go.

Tracer hears a nurse call for a doctor as the blue light washes over her again.

She knows that she must be close.

Lena doesn’t know how long she floats, naked and weightless, before she realizes she can try getting home again.

She thinks of _Slipstream_ , and when she opens her eyes she’s in the hangar where the fighter was developed.

The floor is covered in debris and oddly luminescent fragments, each tagged with little labels and markers. Trying to reconstruct an accident that violated the laws of physics from the scraps unwillingly returned to reality.

A woman with long blonde hair stands next to a giant gorilla discussing lab results. Lena tries to walk up to them, but it feels like she’s walking through mud. Her feet aren’t actually hitting the floor. Her fingertips slide through a solid wall with a strange tingling sensation.

She tries to call out to the woman – _Angela! –_ but what comes out of her mouth is a strange polyphonic shriek, like a tape sped up and then played backwards.

Angela Ziegler cries out in shocked, horrified surprise.

Winston’s eyes go wide, but he looks _fascinated_ , not revolted.

The display on the wall says it is 14:55 hours on November 8th, 2068.

She tries to keep walking towards them, but the resistance she’s been feeling suddenly _snaps_ and she’s catapulted to a strange room that isn’t quite like the _nothing_ , but it almost feels the same as she wakes up in a bed surrounded by an odd glowing bubble. The walls have an odd shape to them, and it looks as if everything has been made from steel and some darker metal – like lead, but _not_.

She’s naked again. There’s a set of pyjamas sitting on her nightstand, and to her surprise she can grab them, rather than her fingers sliding through the material like a ghost. She takes the time to dress.

When she tentatively steps down from the bed to the floor, the metal is cold against her feet, but she is able to stand.

There is a door with a porthole in it at one side of the room. There are no other windows.

The calendar says it is January 12, 2069.

Winston peers in through the portal and gasps in delighted surprise before he thumbs a button that must activate an intercom. “I can’t believe it worked! Can you hear me? Do you understand me?”

Lena gasps with relief and confusion. “I hear you! I’m…who am I, right now? WHEN am I? Where am I?”

The scientist’s eyes are filled with sympathy. “You’re Lena Oxton. You’re a member of Overwatch. You were testing an experimental aircraft with the ability to move through time, and there was an accident. It’s been about four months since you left. I – we – constructed this chamber to try to retrieve you from the time stream. You’re in Watchpoint Gibraltar.”

“Oh.” Lena can’t process it all for a few minutes. She falls back to the bed with a bounce of springs and a creak of complaining metal. “I…I don’t know if this is where I’m supposed to be or not. I kept seeing…other places. Other times.”

“I see.” Winston doesn’t make fun of her. He listens, serious, and lets her talk for a long time, making notes on a pad. “I think I can use this to help stabilize you, Lena. It’ll take some time, but we’re on the right track.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“When is my birthday?”

Winston seems confused by the request, but he looks it up anyway. “That’s…odd.”

Lena – _Tracer_ – shivers. She knows what he’s about to say.

“You seem to have _two_. There’s a duplicate record dated to the founding of….how is that _possible_? I hadn’t been born yet. How can I have filed a report almost thirty years ago on technology I haven’t invented yet?”

“Search me, luv. But I think you must have done. I can almost remember…”

“ ** _Don’t_ tell me.** ” Winston’s voice is surprisingly vehement. “We have to avoid a paradox if at all possible. I can’t…you can’t let me cheat. I have no idea what the consequences would be, but you’ve been through enough. You’re alive – let’s keep it that way.”

“That’d be my preference too, yeah.” Tracer closes her eyes. Some part of her knows now that she’s nearly done. It’s nearly over, and then she will be _whole_ , if not necessarily the person who climbed into that cockpit so long ago. The ripples in time that started from the moment she went into the Slipstream are slowly ebbing, the flow of reality adjusting to a new shape.

She doesn’t even realize she’s begun fading out again until she hears a brief cry of dismay.

When Lena’s eyes open again, her chest is on fire.

She’s in a hospital bed – she can tell that much – and wearing a loose patient’s gown. The neckline allows her to see bandages wrapped tightly around her torso, and a soft blue light shining through the fabric, just between her breasts.

_The Anchor._

Whatever painkillers Angela was able to shove into her system when she reconnected with reality have worn off, and Tracer feels like a sun is exploding inside of her each time she draws a breath.

The steady beep of the heart monitor she’s wearing has risen in pitch, her body responding to the pain by urging her to move, to _run_ , to find somewhere _safe_ and hide until it _stops_. Lena tries to control her panic but it’s a losing battle until the door to her room opens and a golden winged angel appears, her brow creased with worry.

“I’m here, _mausebär._ Try to stay calm – you’ve had quite a rough time of it.” The golden glow intensifies and the pain ebbs, slowly, until it’s down to a dull ache. “I’m sorry, Lena. You are due for more painkillers but we were hoping you might sleep a bit longer after the surgery.”

Tracer’s lips are dry and she has to wet them a few times before she can speak. “It’s ok. I’d rather be awake if I can bear it. What…no…when am I?”

Angela gives her a look of deep sympathy. “Winston said you’d ask that. It’s October tenth, twenty sixty nine.”

“Hah.” Lena smiles at the irony of it all. “Happy birthday to me.”

“Oh, is it?” Angela frowns as she takes a tablet off the wall, the system pulling up her patient’s chart’s automatically. “… _was?!_ How can your records not show a date of birth? That’s impossible. Even if the RAF hadn’t sent us your file I would have _asked!_ ”

Tracer laughs bitterly. “Time travel. I guess that’s part of the paradox Winston mentioned."

“I…” Angela shakes her head. “How very strange.” She moves to the IV line and does something Lena can’t see, but within moments Tracer feels her head growing light, the pain going away, her limbs incredibly heavy.

Tracer hears herself speak as if she’s listening to an old recording, murmuring half-remembered words as she slips into the blissful haze. “ _Ooo._ _Thassa good stuff, innit…_ ”

Angela laughs softly, then runs a gentle hand across Lena’s forehead. “It needs to be. You’ve got a lot to heal. Rest, Tracer. We’ll figure the rest out soon enough.”

_Sorry, Ange, but I don’t think you will…_

The next time she wakes up, Tracer is still in 2069. She is still in bed, and less than a day has passed. She is still in pain, but the tears streaming down Lena Oxton’s cheeks are from relief.

She already knows what will come – some part of her has already lived it, after all. Winston will fit her with the Chronal Accelerator soon. She’ll receive her formal commission as an Overwatch agent, and start fighting the good fight against Talon and other organizations while she masters her new kit and the abilities it grants her.

Tracer knows there’s a shadow over the future – something bad will happen, and it will be _big_ , but Lena can’t remember it. Not well enough to really provide a warning, anyway.

But she knows out of that shadow will come hope. A new dawn as Overwatch rises like a phoenix from the ashes, and she will be right in the middle of it.

For now, Lena knows that Tracer needs to be a hero, so that she can accomplish all the things that need to be done as her past / present / future selves move through time, rebounding and reflecting herself in each of the places she needs to be, in order to make it back home.

When Winston comes into her hospital room with a very familiar white and grey metal apparatus attached to a modified parachute harness, she smiles with excitement and relief, welcoming him and asking what the _hell_ that thing under his arm is.

She can’t help but laugh the moment the Accelerator is brought online for the first time, and the feeling of potential floods through her as the glowing blue disks of the energy array begin to rotate in time with the steady pulse of her anchoring implant.

Time for Lena Oxton to learn what Tracer can do.


End file.
